Children’s literature of the Soviet period as a source of philosophical ideas (case of Nikolai Nosov)

Introduction

It is common for Russian literature and philosophy to be closely connected. The main concern of the present study is the question of whether fiction, more precisely, children’s literature of the Soviet period (the period of censorship and ideological bans) is a medium of philosophical discourse (i.e., the discourse of free critical thinking) which could provide non-judgmental attitude to social reality and succeed in predicting its future. The aim of the present study is to identify the basic content of philosophical concepts and social projections in the children’s literature of the specified period, based on the fantasy trilogy by Nikolai Nosov ‘Dunno and His Friends’ Adventures’ (1953-54), ‘Dunno in Sunny City’ (1958), and ‘Dunno on the Moon’ (1964-1965)^[2].

The research hypothesis is the assumption that since the mid-1950s, children’s literature in the USSR became relatively safer ideologically, an ‘oasis’ in which its best representatives could afford to freely express ideas of a philosophical nature and make forecasts of social development that differed significantly from those acceptable in the official Soviet philosophy.

History showed that, contrary to the predictions of Soviet ideologists, Nikolai Nosov’s expectations have been generally justified. As noted by contemporary critical Marxists A. Buzgalin and A. Kolganov, who analyzed the experience of formation, development and split of the USSR, “the lessons of the recent past… indicate the tragedies we should not repeat” (Buzgalin & Kolganov, 2012, p. 3). Especially in this age of instability, of technological challenges and new threats to humanity, to human freedom and true democracy, it is important for humanities researchers to turn to the experience of successful warnings about such large-scale tragedies, regardless of the theoretical approaches and political platforms these researchers adhere to. In this respect, the present study is relevant for the whole complex of modern humanities.

Speaking about the degree of problem elaboration, we should start with an obviously insufficient acquaintance of English-speaking readers with the original source. By 2017, only the first part of N. Nosov’s trilogy, ‘Dunno and His Friends’ Adventures’, is translated into English (Margaret Wetlin’s translation of 1980). N. Nosov’s books are mentioned, and his career is regarded in famous literary reviews made by Humphrey Carpenter, Mary Pritchard (1995) and Ben Hellman (2013); however, there is no evidence of a proper philosophical study of Nosov’s texts in these literary reviews.

A thorough study of Nosov’s works in comparison with the works of foreign children’s writers Alexander Milne (a series of books about Winnie-the-Pooh) and Tove Jansson (a series of books about the adventures of The Moomins) is performed by Canadian anthropologist Layla Abdel-Rahim (2015). She believes that Nosov’s texts can be interpreted as an attempt to find a compromise between the narrative of wild nature in harmony with which man exists in traditional society (the first part of the trilogy) and the narrative of civilization, in her opinion, inevitably leading to tragic end for the person – to high-tech capitalism (the second and third parts of the trilogy). According to L. Abdel-Rahim, N. Nosov is unreasonably optimistic about the technology culture, and its concept is selfcontradictory: in her opinion, the attempt to free society from hierarchical relationships by means of machines is doomed to failure, since the machines themselves need a hierarchically organized infrastructure and a division of labor that provokes social inequality. According to her interpretation of the trilogy about Dunno, the only way out of the social problems generated by techno culture, according to N. Nosov, is a literal (and quite illogical from the ‘social progress’ point of view) return to traditional society and reunification with nature.

However, it should be remembered that N. Nosov is a Soviet writer, and therefore it is very important to try to interpret his ideas and his social forecasts in the optics of the Marxist version of social philosophy. There is no such kind of analysis in the meaningful and interesting work of L. Abdel-Rahim, proceeding from the principles of comparative anthropology.

The work by Louise Caraivan (2016) is sustained in the spirit of identifying political narratives in N. Nosov’s texts. In her opinion, in his books “spheres of public life, education, and social policy intersect… in order to teach the reader through a gripping narrative” (Caraivan, 2016, p.135). Nosov’s stories are “highly loaded with political implications”, although Caraivan adds that the English and German texts are politically loaded as well (Caraivan, 2016, p.137). Rightly noting the dissonance of Dunno’s image with the ‘correct’, extremely organized and sufficiently conformist characters in the literature of socialist realism, and also noting the fragility of ‘developed socialism’ reflected in the second part of the trilogy ‘Dunno in Sunny City’, L. Caraivan, as L. Abdel-Rahim, does not analyze the critical and prognostic functions of Nosov’s texts from the Marxist philosophy point of view.

Speaking about understanding N. Nosov’s creative heritage by post-Soviet Russian authors, we should note the lack of serious studies of this phenomenon; to some extent, several works of a publicist nature can be considered exceptions (Elizarov, Curiy).

Thus, we can note significant ‘gaps’ in the philosophical comprehension of N. Nosov’s heritage, not yet covered by both Russian-speaking and English-speaking researchers.

Materials and methods

The basic materials for the study were authentic Russian texts of N. Nosov’s trilogy: ‘Dunno and His Friends’ Adventures’ (1980a) written in 1953-54, ‘Dunno in Sunny City’ (1980b) written in 1958, and ‘Dunno on the Moon’ (1981) written in 1964-1965. The main research method was cultural-historical and comparative analysis and text interpretation. Under this methodology, fiction books are considered products of social life and specific historical conditions that are mapped to some social, ideological and philosophical settings expressed there.

Results and discussion

Fiction is in many ways connected with scientific, critical, documentary, and philosophical literature, and literature is one of the most important and ancient ways of using language, like philosophy, although differently. Language is the reality of thought, so the development of literature is undoubtedly connected with theoretical thinking development, although not identical to it. G. E. Lessing’s (1957) rightfully observed that the power of the literary image is in expressing the action an object performs or an impression it makes. The imagery of literary art, is based on the reflection of the world, mediated through the sphere of experience and contemplation (Lessing, 1957). Therefore, literature becomes indispensable as a universal artistic expression. Literature is able to contemplate life more than other arts. G.G. Gadamer (1991) notes that “among all the language phenomena, the work of fiction has a predominant relation to interpretation and thus acts in close proximity with philosophy” (1991). The main force of the literary image is a special kind of artistic dialectics—the ability to correlate, to compare the various phenomena, sometimes disunited, to reveal one through another.

In the history of philosophy, the phenomenon of existentialism is known, perhaps one of the few trends in the twentieth century philosophy that truly achieved public recognition. This happened, in our opinion, in many respects because in existentialism, the artistic method was no less important than the rationalistic scientific method. Therefore, the most adequate genres for existentialism always were fiction and journalism. In the late 1960’s, this philosophical trend was almost completely transformed into artistic fiction and transferred on screen and book pages.

Here, we are dealing with philosophers engaged in the movement towards literature. However, the reverse vector is the movement from literature to philosophy. The philosophical comprehension of the world by writers is traditionally characteristic of Russia. It is a well-known fact that in the West, many of the greatest Russian writers are known precisely as philosophers, (Berlin, 2008) and domestic philosophers in the more strict sense of the word (representatives of the philosophical community proper, philosophers of pre-Soviet and Soviet, post-Soviet period) are less known. It is commonly believed the literary texts of writers openly published in the USSR cannot compete with the texts of classical Russian writers like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in being ‘enriched’ with philosophical problems; in our opinion, this statement is debatable.

The origins of philosophic literature in Russia can be traced back to the beginning of the XIX century, when the reaction of the autocracy to the Decembrist uprising was excluding philosophy from all the universities in Russia and persecuting professors until the middle of the century. It was during this period that the ‘academic’ philosophy (for the first, but not the last time in the history of Russia) moved from academic audiences to numerous circles created in Petersburg and Moscow, and to journalism and literature (Bezlepkin, 2002, p. 31). According to Russian and Soviet writer and literary critic R. V. Ivanov-Razumnik (1997, pp. 271-272), it was one of the most brilliant periods in the history of Russian ideological development (Ivanov-Razumnik, 1997). We often speak of ‘L. N. Tolstoy’s philosophy’, ‘F. Dostoevsky’s philosophy’, thus reaffirming their unconditional right to express philosophical ideas. According to V. Podoroga,

our literature-centric culture does not have philosophical reflection, critical sense and tradition not because philosophy itself was absent, but because it was very literary, very dependent on literature. Therefore, we did not have a rigid division, a gap that is characteristic of Western society. It did not produce two equal areas that could compete (Podoroga, 2005).

In the twentieth century, philosophy (particularly in Russia) was tightly intertwined with the artistic forms of the word due to the ‘linguistic revolution’ and to the rapid growth of scientific interest to language structure and functions, and due to the awareness that metaphorical entities have their specific role in various types of everyday, artistic and scientific discourse, and in spheres of culture (Beresneva & Abramenko, 2017).

No modern philosophical trend escaped this temptation (as noted above, it was particularly characteristic of existentialism and postmodernism) (Kolesnikov, 2000).

An integral part of literature is children’s literature that serves as a key channel to reproduce the society culture. However, philosophy in its own forms, outside figurative allegories, did not take root at once in children’s and teenage Russian literature; in the pre-Soviet period, the famous children’s literature historian I. Arzamastseva names only V. Odoevsky in his respect (Arzamastseva, 2008). After the revolution and until the 1930s, not a single children’s and teenage book about ‘abstract objects’ was published. The political situation required from literature the formation of a ‘new man’; the leading place in it was acquired by the themes of socialist construction, the development of a new morality. An original response to this was the ‘migration’ of philosophically thinking Soviet writers to ‘oases of ideological security’, less controllable by the authorities—children’s literature and literature about nature; the result of such ‘migration’ was the ‘golden age’ of children’s literature in the USSR in the late 1940s-1960s.

In our opinion, fantasy, including children’s fairytales, representing artificial models of social structure as a metaphorical form of verifying philosophical hypotheses, is implicated in philosophical reflection. “Unlike art itself, such works are transient and last in the historical flow of culture… only as long as the socio-religious and other ideas that generated them are of relevance in the society” (Kolesnikov, 2000, p. 205).

From this point of view, the well-known trilogy about the adventures of Dunno and his friends – mites is a ‘conductor’ of philosophical ideas and non-trivial forecasts in the field of children’s literature of the Soviet period. Mites are small anthropomorphic creatures, about the size of a small cucumber, and Dunno is the most famous mite in the Flower City, a stupid and overly active dreamer and mischief-maker who “knows nothing” and is, so to speak, the “zero level” of a child beginning socialization (Nosov, 1980a).

The broad cognitive material from various fields of science, technology and art is presented to the readers in a funny and simple form, and moral issues are solved. The books have ethical clarity and take into account the age and psychological characteristics of the child.

In our opinion, N. Nosov’s trilogy may well be considered as a popular (and at the same time very interesting in form) rendering of the basic principles of Marxist social philosophy and political economy. In addition, after a careful reading, Nosov’s realization of the critical and prognostic function of philosophy also becomes obvious.

Following the evolution of social development concepts, the first book can be regarded as a utopia of a traditional society that appropriates production and natural exchange in the spirit of J.-J. Rousseau, with a significant emphasis on the problems of gender and tolerance (and at a time when not only Soviet philosophers but also thinkers of the West did not seriously address this problem). The second book is a utopia of technocratic socialism, based on the principles of subsistence-automated production. An essential part of the third book is a capitalist dystopia, localized on the Moon, an artistic presentation of the political economy of capitalism with its realities—advertising, joint-stock companies, banks, strikes, unemployment, stock exchange, market relations, etc.

The complex society described by Nosov develops, and the language of his books becomes more complicated, meant for older children. These books grow with the reader, repeating in brief the history of human civilization as a whole, as if following a special ‘genetic law’. This technique of ‘the book growing with the reader’ was later used by Joan Rowling in her remarkable series about Harry Potter, which, perhaps, provided her with phenomenal and, most importantly, stable success for a number of years. However, in our opinion, one of the pioneers of this technique is N. Nosov.

Any part of the trilogy about Dunno makes it obvious that N. Nosov always ‘adjusts’ to the age of his target audience, raising truly philosophical ‘eternal’ questions about the human nature, about the relationship between the individual and the society, between man and technology, about good and evil, duty and conscience, about the social progress, its price and challenges associated with it. The clear formulation of the ‘golden rule of ethics’ (combining rationality and morality) in the second book of the trilogy is a perfect example:

… the fight against violators of order … did not bring any noticeable results until the mites got wiser … over time they became so clever that no one ever fought anyone else, no one took someone else’s belongings. Everyone began to understand it is necessary to treat others as you would like to be treated yourself (Nosov, 1980b, pp. 263-264).

A unique and complex question for the Marxist theory of society is the unexpected fragility of ‘developed socialism’ (the second book of the trilogy) that Nosov noticed, which only seems invulnerable under the technical ‘armor’ of industrial machinery. The main localization of the second book of the trilogy—Sunny City—is so named by its inhabitants because all the forces of nature, including the weather conditions, are discovered and fully controlled. Fully automated material production and planned economy provides abundance, a huge amount of free time used for creative work and is even able (albeit with some difficulties) to respond to unpredictable fluctuations in consumer demand without resorting to natural exchange (as in the Flower City) or commodity-money exchange and market mechanism (as on the Moon).

Here is how the benefits of the planned automated production of Sunny City (in comparison with the Flower City based on the natural exchange), as well as the difficulties encountered in the production process, are described by N. Nosov in both cases: “Machines help you work,” Dunno replied,

but we do not have any machines. And we do not have shops. You live together, and each our little house stands alone. Because of this, there is a lot of confusion… let’s say you have to give the tailor a pear for trousers… But if a tailor does not need a pear but… a table, then you have to go to the carpenter, give him a pear for… a table, and then exchange this table for the trousers. But the carpenter may also say that he does not need a pear but an axe…

The failures of the economic mechanism in a traditional society are compensated by non-economic regulation based on what Leila Abdel-Rahim regards as a principle of the Hawaiian kinship system characteristic of many traditional societies: “At most, friends will not let you come undone, and someone will give you a pair of trousers…” (Nosov, 1980b, pp. 330-331).

Moreover, here is how things are with the automated production of Sunny City: “on all the nine floors our travelers did not meet a single mite… since all the processes, up to the packaging of the finished products, were carried out by machines…” However, the persistent problem in the society of developed socialism is the unpredictability of consumer behavior:

The problem is fashion… no one wants to wear the same dress, and always strives to put on something new, original… We are feverish … Seeing… not quite an ordinary suit… our residents begin to imagine that a new fashion has appeared, and they are rushing to the shops to get these suits… we have to make new products in a hurry, and this is not easy.

As a result, despite the operational connection between the spheres of distribution and production, a situation arises where “huge quantities of yellow pants… remain in shops” (Nosov, 1980b, p. 350). Actually, Nosov suggests that socialist planned economy cannot be effective without some analogue of consumer market.

As a result, it is enough for three ‘whifflers’ (donkeys turned by Dunno into people with the help of a magic wand) to interfere to bring this system into chaos: former donkeys became role models for the masses due to being different from everyone. Almost instantly, rudeness, aggression, theft, and degradation of art and culture are returning to Sunny City: “Now it was rarely possible to see cheerful, joyful faces. Everyone felt like fish out of water, walked about as if dazed and timidly looked around” (Nosov, 1980b, p. 359). The only way to deal with the three ‘whifflers’ and their numerous followers was police warnings and arrests; however, the arrestees were soon released, since the police could not stand the pangs of remorse. Finally, the three guests from the Flower City realize they will be better off in the traditional society of their native city than in the public chaos of Sunny City and decide to leave (Nosov, 1980b, p. 361).

It is significant that all the technical methods of combating ‘whifflers’ (‘pedestrian radar’, ‘inflatable coat’) are also ineffective. The car is also useless, as Klyopka the Engineer pointed straight out: “They’ll unscrew something just like that, or even steal the car” (Nosov, 1980b, p. 373). A machine can be invented, made to tell bedtime stories, and even be given a name, which is done regularly in Sunny City (Nosov, 1980b, p. 202). Yet this machine does not become a person and cannot take responsibility for human actions. It will not save What we today could call genetic engineering designed to correct hereditary defects leading to antisocial behavior, is not of help either; the same engineer Klyopka states: “I will never believe that donkeys can turn into mites. Science … has not yet come to that…” (Nosov, 1980b, p. 374).

In the sense of a substantively critical attitude to technological determinism, N. Nosov is more perspicacious than many Soviet philosophers (who believed that the development of labor would almost automatically lead to developed socialism and communism) and than some of his followers, creators of literature for children and teenagers in the USSR in the 1960s-80s. For example, A. M. Volkov’s characters (the author of a remarkable series of fairy tales about the adventures of Ellie and her friends in the Magic Land) solve all the problems with widgets and not with magic (Volkov, 2010). N. Nosov perfectly understands that nothing is so simple since it is not about machines but about the maturity of man and about human relations. Science and technology gave man miraculous powers comparable to those of Dunno’s magic wand, yet who uses these powers, and for what?

Here, probably, lies the diagnosis of both the fairytale Sunny City and a very real society of developed socialism that eagerly gave away all its gains and threw hundreds of millions of people into the millstones of capitalism again in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This diagnosis is the clear immaturity of the man of the epoch of socialism, the insufficient development of social relations, the totality of which, according to Karl Marx, is each human individual (Marx & Engels, 1955). Apparently, by discovering the world scientifically and creating technology on the basis of this knowledge, people should develop their own essence ahead of time, create themselves, create truly human life not only in its economic, scientific and technical manifestations, but also in all the others, inextricably linked, thereby moving away from the animal state and from imitating its antagonistic social formations.

From the point of view of the Marxist theory of society, which had a significant impact on Nosov’s worldview, Abdel-Rahim’s above stated position—high technological capitalism as the final stage of social development (‘the end of history’) inevitably emerges from the traditional society ‘infected’ with technological innovations—is erroneous. It seems history is a much more complicated and multivariate process, and the role of a traditional society transformed by new social conditions, armed with technologies similar to modern convergent technologies (NBICS-technologies) which create preconditions for overcoming the division of labor and the alienation of the production process from the natural process, can be more constructive than in Sunny City.

At the same time, the correctness of L. Abdel-Rahim’s position is that if the culture and consciousness of individuals remain at the level of the traditional society, if they are not profoundly transformed, the ‘breakdown’ of history to capitalist forms is very likely. Only a miracle can save socialism, ‘advanced’ in the sense of technology, but not in terms of the maturity of human individuals and their relations, and the Wizard who once gave Dunno a magic wand creates this miracle in Sunny City (Nosov, 1980b, p. 398). Apparently, for N. Nosov the challenge that Soviet socialism faced was already evident in the 1950s, i.e. at the time when Soviet philosophers did not realize or, at least, did not speak openly about it. Perhaps the first Soviet official to speak of this from the standpoint of Marxist philosophy and political economy was Y.V. Andropov; his words that the “developed socialism” in the USSR will still take long to be improved and completed (i.e., his recognition that developed socialism is not yet accomplished) acquired wide popularity in the late USSR: “Frankly speaking, we … still do not know the society in which we live to the proper extent…” (Andropov, 1983, p. 294). However, this belated recognition of the aged Secretary General of the Central Committee of the CPSU happened 30 years after the publication of N. Nosov’s trilogy.

Speaking about the prognostic function of philosophy in the form of N. Nosov’s works, one can also recall a number of his strikingly accurate more private predictions, decades ahead of time: from wall-mounted TVs, robot vacuum cleaners and technical telepathy to a number of features of postmodernism and gambling addiction (Nosov, 1980b, pp. 337, 356-357).

N. Nosov’s books demonstrate a certain vision of the social ideal, the ideal of man, “in whom everything must be perfect”. This ideal is deep unity of truth represented by the achievements of science and technology, of good specified by the moral norms (to the formation of these among his young readers Nosov pays most attention) and of beauty Nosov demonstrates not only in his remarkable characters but also in the perfect aesthetic form of his works.

However, N. Nosov is the son of his time, and his books are the cut of the epoch with all its achievements and limitations. For example, the environmental issues that occupy such a prominent place among the later interpreters of N. Nosov (for example, L. Abdel-Rahim, repeatedly mentioned) did not receive serious coverage in any of his books, although the novel ‘Russian forest’ by L. Leonov (1955) already started the tradition of ‘artistic ecology’ in the Soviet literature. N. Nosov rather focuses on the ‘gigantism’ of traditional society nature, which makes it possible to realize the appropriating way of managing (the size of vegetables, fruits, berries, mushrooms in the Flower City is life scale, while mites are the size of a cucumber), and then speaks of the poverty of nature and of its alienated character in case of capitalism (on the Moon, berries, vegetables and fruits are as small for mites as they are for real people), and finally, he speaks of the nature’s ‘tamed’, controlled character in case of socialism. It seems that N. Nosov still stands on scientistic and technocratic positions, believing that if science and technology “will not cope” with the internal contradictions of society, yet they are able to fully resolve the contradictions of society with nature. Significantly, later authors considered it necessary to fill this gap in the artistic and philosophical world of N. Nosov, for example, his grandson, the author of the ecological fairytale ‘Dunno’s Journey to the Stone City’ (Nosov, 2002).

Where is the solution, the recipe for solving social issues Nosov managed to raise so sharply and perspicaciously? The decision is in the objectively existing unity of the human race, as well as in the inseparable connection between man and nature, as shown by N. Nosov not only in the ‘intergender world’ at the end of the first book, and not only in the remarkable festival which removes the last traces of alienation—in the ‘Mitten Exchange Holiday’ at the end of the second book. Even in the Moon capitalist society torn apart by antagonistic contradictions (where ‘the landing party’ arrives to save Dunno who stole the rocket), we find mites of the same anthropological type—those who do not have any problems of mutual communication.

The last part of N. Nosov’s trilogy ends with the scene of dying Dunno coming back to Earth after his lunar capitalist misadventures and miraculously healed by the Earthly nature. Unlike the opinion of L. Abdel-Rahim, it is possible to interpret this image not only as a literal and hardly possible restoration of the unity of traditional society man and of nature, his ‘dissolution’ in it. Indeed, this is definitely the restoration of the unity of man and nature, yet man and nature have changed since prehistoric times, and the final book of Nosov’s trilogy ends with a unity of a much higher level than that of virgin nature and archaic man. The key to non-violent transformation of lunar capitalist society is highly developed altruistic human relations together with the seeds of giant terrestrial plants and achievements of scientific-technical progress—the highest-level union between man, technology and nature (Nosov, 1981, pp. 388-402, 428-440).

Not accidental in this regard seem the final words of the protagonist in N. Nosov’s trilogy: “Well, guys, that’s all!… And now we can travel somewhere again!” Such was Dunno the mite” (Nosov, 1981, p. 458). The verb in the past tense ‘was’ here is definitely devoid of temporality—mites do not grow old and never die. It is just that little Dunno himself, the fairytale society he represents and the young readers of N. Nosov’s books have grown, have ceased to be ‘dunnoes’ and are now ready to meet new challenges. So history, no matter how complex and ‘inconsistent’ it may be from the point of view of philosophy and literature theorists, certainly has a chance of continuation.

Conclusion

Based on the analysis of the texts of, as well as the texts of his interpreters, it can be concluded that the hypothesis of the study is highly probable: the connection between critical Russian philosophy and fiction in the Soviet era did not cease, despite all the difficulties and contradictions of this period. In the conditions of ideological pressure, having mastered the atypical format of fiction for children, the ideas and forecasts of this philosophy in the person of N. Nosov acquired a talented conductor, which had a significant impact on the formation of the younger generation both in the late Soviet and post-Soviet period. Under the conditions of ideological pressure, in the atypical format of children’s literature, the ideas and forecasts of this philosophy acquired a talented conductor who had a significant impact on the formation of the younger generation in both the late Soviet and post-Soviet period—Nikolai Nosov.